10/07/2012
This weekend’s Radio Derb is up on iTunes and Taki’s Magazine: instructions in the box here.
In one segment I discuss the interestion of HBD, "game," and politics. From the transcript:
The most interesting talk about the election is taking place on those blogs where politics and culture are discussed from an HBD viewpoint.
HBD, in case you're not au courant with the term, stands for "human biodiversity." The HBD viewpoint looks at human nature in the context of biology, especially of evolutionary psychology. In Chapter Seven of my worldwide bestseller We Are Doomed I identified two other viewpoints, the religious and the culturist. The religious sees human nature as a special creation of God, gifted with supernatural qualities and privileges. The culturist, or Marxist viewpoint sees human nature as entirely a product of the individual’s surroundings — on the nature-nurture scale, it’s extreme nurturism.
So, as I said, blogs that discuss human nature and human affairs from an HBD viewpoint have been saying some of the most interesting things about this election.
The grand guru of the HBD viewpoint, in the blogosphere at any rate, is Steve Sailer at isteve.blogspot.com. Steve has been arguing for years that Republicans need to take up what, in Steve’s honor, is now called the Sailer Strategy. As briefly as it can be stated, the Sailer Strategy says that since non-Hispanic whites are still a hefty majority of the nation — 63 percent — and an even heftier majority of the electorate — close to three-quarters — a smart Republican politician should strive to get as much as he can of the white vote. With self-identified Hispanics at only 17 percent of the population, and less than ten percent of the electorate, increasing your Hispanic share by one-tenth will get you one percent of the electorate. Increasing your white share by one-tenth gets you more than seven percent. It’s just arithmetic.
Last weekend, however, the blogger who calls himself Whiskey, blogging at whiskeysplace.wordpress.com, put up a post headlined Why The Sailer Strategy Doesn’t Work.
Why, according to Whiskey, does the Sailer Strategy not work? In a word: women.
Sample quote from Whiskey:
Obama took single White women in 2008, on the order of 70 percent … Single White women exist in sizable numbers. Single White Women out-number married White Women by a considerable margin. Late marriage, with its inevitable high divorce rates, pretty much guarantees that … The famous Gender Gap exists for a reason. White women, particularly single ones but even married ones, have very different interests and desires than White men … White women (as shown by anything they read or watch) want an aristocratic, hereditary, semi-feudal society based on personal interaction, attractiveness, and charisma. Not nerdy abstraction leading to science-babble stuff about reversing the polarity of the shields and modulating the anti-matter field, or something. White women want bondage fantasies, hunky gay vampires, kings and queens and princesses, while White men want the scientific techno-nerd-ocracy of Star Trek.
End quote. In a comment thread on Steve Sailer’s own blog Whiskey goes on to argue that, quote:
If Romney wants to win, he has to get more than McCain’s 60 percent of the white vote. That means women. Since Obama took white single women by over 70 percent, and has an edge on abortion, contraception, paying for it, female preferences, culture wars, and the like. Romney can’t win them but he can cut that percentage down by say 10 percent.
End quote. Now over to a different blogger, the one who calls himself Heartiste, H-E-A-R-T-I-S-T-E, blogging at heartiste.wordpress.com. Heartiste belongs to the sphere of bloggers who call themselves "PUAs." It stands for "pick-up artists." These are guys who fancy they have developed an art — or maybe it’s a science, I’m not sure — of picking up women via techniques collectively known as "game."
The connection with HBD is that PUAs build their art, or science, on evolutionary psychology. Women have certain instincts shaped by evolution. They are, for example, attracted to high-status men as being better able to protect their young. High-status men — "alphas," in PUA jargon — have a certain look, certain body language, certain ways of dealing with others. Even if you're not actually high-status, by perfecting these outward traits you can make yourself attractive to women. If you don’t have alpha traits, you're a beta or a "herb," whom women will regard with contempt or actual hatred. That’s the rough idea.
Heartiste is the best of these PUA bloggers. He’s literate, funny, scientifically well-informed, politically conservative, and utterly cynical. His language, unfortunately, doesn’t lend itself to direct quotation on a family website, but I'll give you the gist.
So here is Heartiste posting on Thursday this week, headline: The Problem With Single Women Having The Vote. Edited quote:
When you don’t have an alpha male in your personal life to admire and rely on for support (partly because you make your own money and don’t feel a pressing need to have a middle class compliment-&-cuddle herb around for security), you turn to the next facsimile — the substitute alpha male who promises limitless resources for you and your future sprogling. This substitute alpha male is The State, and its emissary is Obama.
End quote. Heartiste goes on to quote a poll from earlier in the week that bears out his analysis. Here’s the poll, numbers in percentages.
? Married men: for Romney by 54-35, Romney’s margin 19.
? Married women: for Romney, 49-42, Romney’s margin 7.
? Single men: for Obama, 47-38, Obama’s margin 9.
? Single women: for Obama, 60-31, Obama’s margin 29.
Did you spot the biggest margin there? That’s the case being made.
Heartiste goes on to say that, edited quote, "Whiskey is onto something. I swim among single women — mostly white, mostly educated and/or intelligent, in their 20s and 30s — and I can assure you they [are intensely committed to] Obama and leftie policies in general. Romney may as well be the anti-Christ." End quote.
I leave this for you to mull over, listeners. Are single white women the assassins of conservatism? With single white women against him, does Mitt Romney have a chance of getting as much as he needs of the white vote? Was the 19th Amendment all a ghastly mistake?
I leave it with you. As an old married guy, I know little about young single women. There is precisely one of them in my household. If Nellie Derbyshire is representative, then Whiskey and Heartiste are correct, and Romney is doomed. But loth I am to extrapolate from a sample of one …
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.